OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Complex Systems and a Computational Social Science Perspective on the Labor Market
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2016
Year: 2016

Labor market institutions are central for modern economies, and their polices can directly affect unemployment rates and economic growth. At the individual level, unemployment often has a detrimental impact on people's well-being and health. At the national level, high employment is one of the central goals of any economic policy, due to its close association with national prosperity. The main goal of this thesis is to highlight the need for frameworks that take into account the complex structure of labor market interactions. In particular, we explore the benefits of leveraging tools from computational social science, network science, and data-driven theories to measure the flow of opportunities and information in the context of the labor market. First, we investigate our key hypothesis, which is that opportunity/information flow through weak ties, and this is a key determinant of the length of unemployment. We then extend the idea of opportunity/information flow to clusters of other economic activities, where we expect the flow within clusters of related activities to be higher than within isolated activities. This captures the intuition that within related activities there are more "capitals" involved and that such activities require similar "capabilities." Therefore, more extensive clusters of economic activities should generate greater growth through exploiting the greater flow of opportunities and information. We quantify the opportunity/information flow using a complexity measure of two economic activities (i.e. jobs and exports).
How to Compute Halting
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2016
Year: 2016

A consistently specified halting function may be computed.
Recurrent Neural Networks for Dialogue State Tracking
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2016
Year: 2016

This paper discusses models for dialogue state tracking using recurrent neural networks (RNN). We present experiments on the standard dialogue state tracking (DST) dataset, DSTC2. On the one hand, RNN models became the state of the art models in DST, on the other hand, most state-of-the-art models are only turn-based and require dataset-specific preprocessing (e.g. DSTC2-specific) in order to achieve such results. We implemented two architectures which can be used in incremental settings and require almost no preprocessing. We compare their performance to the benchmarks on DSTC2 and discuss their properties. With only trivial preprocessing, the performance of our models is close to the state-of- the-art results.
Distributed Optimization Under Adversarial Nodes
Venue: arXiv cs.SY 2016
Year: 2016

We investigate the vulnerabilities of consensus-based distributed optimization protocols to nodes that deviate from the prescribed update rule (e.g., due to failures or adversarial attacks). We first characterize certain fundamental limitations on the performance of any distributed optimization algorithm in the presence of adversaries. We then propose a resilient distributed optimization algorithm that guarantees that the non-adversarial nodes converge to the convex hull of the minimizers of their local functions under certain conditions on the graph topology, regardless of the actions of a certain number of adversarial nodes. In particular, we provide sufficient conditions on the graph topology to tolerate a bounded number of adversaries in the neighborhood of every non-adversarial node, and necessary and sufficient conditions to tolerate a globally bounded number of adversaries. For situations where there are up to F adversaries in the neighborhood of every node, we use the concept of maximal F-local sets of graphs to provide lower bounds on the distance-to-optimality of achievable solutions under any algorithm. We show that finding the size of such sets is NP-hard.
Predicting risky behavior in social communities
Venue: arXiv cs.SI 2016
Year: 2016

Predicting risk profiles of individuals in networks (e.g.~susceptibility to a particular disease, or likelihood of smoking) is challenging for a variety of reasons. For one, `local' features (such as an individual's demographic information) may lack sufficient information to make informative predictions; this is especially problematic when predicting `risk,' as the relevant features may be precisely those that an individual is disinclined to reveal in a survey. Secondly, even if such features are available, they still may miss crucial information, as `risk' may be a function not just of an individual's features but also those of their friends and social communities. Here, we predict individual's risk profiles as a function of both their local features and those of their friends. Instead of modeling influence from the social network directly (which proved difficult as friendship links may be sparse and partially observed), we instead model influence by discovering social communities in the network that may be related to risky behavior. The result is a model that predicts risk as a function of local features, while making up for their deficiencies and accounting for social influence by uncovering community structure in the network. We test our model by predicting risky behavior among adolescents from the Add health data set, and hometowns among users in a Facebook ego net. Compared to prediction by features alone, our model demonstrates better predictive accuracy when measured as a whole, and in particular when measured as a function of network "richness."
On The Multi-Hop Extension of Energy-Efficient WSN Time Synchronization Based on Time-Translating Gateways
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2016
Year: 2016

We report preliminary results of a simulation study on the multi-hop extension of the recently-proposed energy-efficient wireless sensor network time synchronization scheme based on time-translating gateways. Unlike the single-hop case, in multi-hop time synchronization a sensor node sends measurement data to a head node through gateways which translate the timestamp values of the received measurement data. Through simulations for two-hop time synchronization, we analyze the impact of the addition of a gateway and its translation of timestamp values on the clock frequency and measurement time estimation and thereby demonstrate the feasibility of the multi-hop extension of the energy-efficient WSN time synchronization based on time-translating gateways.
Synthesis of Strategies Using the Hoare Logic of Angelic and Demonic Nondeterminism
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2016
Year: 2016

We study a propositional variant of Hoare logic that can be used for reasoning about programs that exhibit both angelic and demonic nondeterminism. We work in an uninterpreted setting, where the meaning of the atomic actions is specified axiomatically using hypotheses of a certain form. Our logical formalism is entirely compositional and it subsumes the non-compositional formalism of safety games on finite graphs. We present sound and complete Hoare-style calculi that are useful for establishing partial-correctness assertions, as well as for synthesizing implementations. The computational complexity of the Hoare theory of dual nondeterminism is investigated using operational models, and it is shown that the theory is complete for exponential time.
Actor-critic versus direct policy search: a comparison based on sample complexity
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2016
Year: 2016

Sample efficiency is a critical property when optimizing policy parameters for the controller of a robot. In this paper, we evaluate two state-of-the-art policy optimization algorithms. One is a recent deep reinforcement learning method based on an actor-critic algorithm, Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG), that has been shown to perform well on various control benchmarks. The other one is a direct policy search method, Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES), a black-box optimization method that is widely used for robot learning. The algorithms are evaluated on a continuous version of the mountain car benchmark problem, so as to compare their sample complexity. From a preliminary analysis, we expect DDPG to be more sample efficient than CMA-ES, which is confirmed by our experimental results.
Optimising The Input Window Alignment in CD-DNN Based Phoneme Recognition for Low Latency Processing
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2016
Year: 2016

We present a systematic analysis on the performance of a phonetic recogniser when the window of input features is not symmetric with respect to the current frame. The recogniser is based on Context Dependent Deep Neural Networks (CD-DNNs) and Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). The objective is to reduce the latency of the system by reducing the number of future feature frames required to estimate the current output. Our tests performed on the TIMIT database show that the performance does not degrade when the input window is shifted up to 5 frames in the past compared to common practice (no future frame). This corresponds to improving the latency by 50 ms in our settings. Our tests also show that the best results are not obtained with the symmetric window commonly employed, but with an asymmetric window with eight past and two future context frames, although this observation should be confirmed on other data sets. The reduction in latency suggested by our results is critical for specific applications such as real-time lip synchronisation for tele-presence, but may also be beneficial in general applications to improve the lag in human-machine spoken interaction.
Three dimensional graph drawing with fixed vertices and one bend per edge
Venue: arXiv cs.CG 2016
Year: 2016

We prove that for every graph $G$, given fixed locations for the vertices of $G$ in $\mathbb{Z}^3$, there is a three-dimensional grid-drawing of $G$ with one bend per edge. The best previous bound was three bends per edge.
The Future of Computing Research: Industry-Academic Collaborations
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2016
Year: 2016

IT-driven innovation is an enormous factor in the worldwide economic leadership of the United States. It is larger than finance, construction, or transportation, and it employs nearly 6% of the US workforce. The top three companies, as measured by market capitalization, are IT companies - Apple, Google (now Alphabet), and Microsoft. Facebook, a relatively recent entry in the top 10 list by market capitalization has surpassed Walmart, the nation's largest retailer, and the largest employer in the world. The net income of just the top three exceeds $80 billion - roughly 100 times the total budget of the NSF CISE directorate which funds 87% of computing research. In short, the direct return on federal research investments in IT research has been enormously profitable to the nation. The IT industry ecosystem is also evolving. The time from conception to market of successful products has been cut from years to months. Product life cycles are increasingly a year or less. This change has pressured companies to focus industrial R&D on a pipeline or portfolio of technologies that bring immediate, or almost immediate, value to the companies. To defeat the competition and stay ahead of the pack, a company must devote resources to realizing gains that are shorter term, and must remain agile to respond quickly to market changes driven by new technologies, new startups, evolving user experience expectations, and the continuous consumer demand for new and exciting products. Amidst this landscape, the Computing Community Consortium convened a round-table of industry and academic participants to better understand the landscape of industry-academic interaction, and to discuss possible actions that might be taken to enhance those interactions. We close with some recommendations for actions that could expand the lively conversation we experienced at the round-table to a national scale.
How smart does your profile image look? Estimating intelligence from social network profile images
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2016
Year: 2016

Profile images on social networks are users' opportunity to present themselves and to affect how others judge them. We examine what Facebook images say about users' perceived and measured intelligence. 1,122 Facebook users completed a matrices intelligence test and shared their current Facebook profile image. Strangers also rated the images for perceived intelligence. We use automatically extracted image features to predict both measured and perceived intelligence. Intelligence estimation from images is a difficult task even for humans, but experimental results show that human accuracy can be equalled using computing methods. We report the image features that predict both measured and perceived intelligence, and highlight misleading features such as "smiling" and "wearing glasses" that are correlated with perceived but not measured intelligence. Our results give insights into inaccurate stereotyping from profile images and also have implications for privacy, especially since in most social networks profile images are public by default.
Motion Planning With Gamma-Harmonic Potential Fields
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2016
Year: 2016

This paper extends the capabilities of the harmonic potential field (HPF) approach to planning. The extension covers the situation where the workspace of a robot cannot be segmented into geometrical subregions where each region has an attribute of its own. The suggested approach uses a task-centered, probabilistic descriptor of the workspace as an input to the planner. This descriptor is processed, along with a goal point, to yield the navigation policy needed to steer the agent from any point in its workspace to the target. The approach is easily adaptable to planning in a cluttered environment containing a vector drift field. The extension of the HPF approach is based on the physical analogy with an electric current flowing in a nonhomogeneous conducting medium. The resulting potential field is known as the gamma-harmonic potential (GHPF). Proofs of the ability of the modified approach to avoid zero-probability (definite threat) regions and to converge to the goal are provided. The capabilities of the planer are demonstrated using simulation.
Data Compression for Analytics over Large-scale In-memory Column Databases
Venue: arXiv cs.DB 2016
Year: 2016

Data compression schemes have exhibited their importance in column databases by contributing to the high-performance OLAP (Online Analytical Processing) query processing. Existing works mainly concentrate on evaluating compression schemes for disk-resident databases as data is mostly stored on disks. With the continuously decreasing of the price/capacity ratio of main memory, it is the tendencies of the times to reside data in main memory. But the discussion of data compression on in-memory databases is very vague in the literature. In this work, we present an updated discussion about whether it is valuable to use data compression techniques in memory databases. If yes, how should memory databases apply data compression schemes to maximize performance?
Data Suppression Algorithms for Surveillance Applications of Wireless Sensor and Actor Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2016
Year: 2016

This paper introduces algorithms for surveillance applications of wireless sensor and actor networks (WSANs) that reduce communication cost by suppressing unnecessary data transfers. The objective of the considered WSAN system is to capture and eliminate distributed targets in the shortest possible time. Computational experiments were performed to evaluate effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. The experimental results show that a considerable reduction of the communication costs together with a performance improvement of the WSAN system can be obtained by using the communication algorithms that are based on spatiotemporal and decision aware suppression methods.
Performance Based Evaluation of Various Machine Learning Classification Techniques for Chronic Kidney Disease Diagnosis
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2016
Year: 2016

Areas where Artificial Intelligence (AI) & related fields are finding their applications are increasing day by day, moving from core areas of computer science they are finding their applications in various other domains.In recent times Machine Learning i.e. a sub-domain of AI has been widely used in order to assist medical experts and doctors in the prediction, diagnosis and prognosis of various diseases and other medical disorders. In this manuscript the authors applied various machine learning algorithms to a problem in the domain of medical diagnosis and analyzed their efficiency in predicting the results. The problem selected for the study is the diagnosis of the Chronic Kidney Disease.The dataset used for the study consists of 400 instances and 24 attributes. The authors evaluated 12 classification techniques by applying them to the Chronic Kidney Disease data. In order to calculate efficiency, results of the prediction by candidate methods were compared with the actual medical results of the subject.The various metrics used for performance evaluation are predictive accuracy, precision, sensitivity and specificity. The results indicate that decision-tree performed best with nearly the accuracy of 98.6%, sensitivity of 0.9720, precision of 1 and specificity of 1.
LocationSafe: Granular Location Privacy for IoT Devices
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2016
Year: 2016

Today, mobile data owners lack consent and control over the release and utilization of their location data. Third party applications continuously process and access location data without data owners granular control and without knowledge of how location data is being used. The proliferation of IoT devices will lead to larger scale abuses of trust. In this paper we present the first design and implementation of a privacy module built into the GPSD daemon. The GPSD daemon is a low-level GPS interface that runs on GPS enabled devices. The integration of the privacy module ensures that data owners have granular control over the release of their GPS location. We describe the design of our privacy module and then evaluate the performance of private GPS release and demonstrate that strong privacy guarantees can be built into the GPSD daemon itself with minimal to no overhead.
Review Based Rating Prediction
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2016
Year: 2016

Recommendation systems are an important units in today's e-commerce applications, such as targeted advertising, personalized marketing and information retrieval. In recent years, the importance of contextual information has motivated generation of personalized recommendations according to the available contextual information of users. Compared to the traditional systems which mainly utilize users' rating history, review-based recommendation hopefully provide more relevant results to users. We introduce a review-based recommendation approach that obtains contextual information by mining user reviews. The proposed approach relate to features obtained by analyzing textual reviews using methods developed in Natural Language Processing (NLP) and information retrieval discipline to compute a utility function over a given item. An item utility is a measure that shows how much it is preferred according to user's current context. In our system, the context inference is modeled as similarity between the users reviews history and the item reviews history. As an example application, we used our method to mine contextual data from customers' reviews of movies and use it to produce review-based rating prediction. The predicted ratings can generate recommendations that are item-based and should appear at the recommended items list in the product page. Our evaluations suggest that our system can help produce better prediction rating scores in comparison to the standard prediction methods.
Towards A Virtual Assistant That Can Be Taught New Tasks In Any Domain By Its End-Users
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2016
Year: 2016

The challenge stated in the title can be divided into two main problems. The first problem is to reliably mimic the way that users interact with user interfaces. The second problem is to build an instructible agent, i.e. one that can be taught to execute tasks expressed as previously unseen natural language commands. This paper proposes a solution to the second problem, a system we call Helpa. End-users can teach Helpa arbitrary new tasks whose level of complexity is similar to the tasks available from today's most popular virtual assistants. Teaching Helpa does not involve any programming. Instead, users teach Helpa by providing just one example of a command paired with a demonstration of how to execute that command. Helpa does not rely on any pre-existing domain-specific knowledge. It is therefore completely domain-independent. Our usability study showed that end-users can teach Helpa many new tasks in less than a minute each, often much less.
Sharing Network Parameters for Crosslingual Named Entity Recognition
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2016
Year: 2016

Most state of the art approaches for Named Entity Recognition rely on hand crafted features and annotated corpora. Recently Neural network based models have been proposed which do not require handcrafted features but still require annotated corpora. However, such annotated corpora may not be available for many languages. In this paper, we propose a neural network based model which allows sharing the decoder as well as word and character level parameters between two languages thereby allowing a resource fortunate language to aid a resource deprived language. Specifically, we focus on the case when limited annotated corpora is available in one language ($L_1$) and abundant annotated corpora is available in another language ($L_2$). Sharing the network architecture and parameters between $L_1$ and $L_2$ leads to improved performance in $L_1$. Further, our approach does not require any hand crafted features but instead directly learns meaningful feature representations from the training data itself. We experiment with 4 language pairs and show that indeed in a resource constrained setup (lesser annotated corpora), a model jointly trained with data from another language performs better than a model trained only on the limited corpora in one language.
Spherical Harmonic Signal Covariance and Sound Field Diffuseness
Venue: arXiv cs.SD 2016
Year: 2016

Characterizing sound field diffuseness has many practical applications, from room acoustics analysis to speech enhancement and sound field reproduction. In this paper we investigate how spherical microphone arrays (SMAs) can be used to characterize diffuseness. Due to their specific geometry, SMAs are particularly well suited for analyzing the spatial properties of sound fields. In particular, the signals recorded by an SMA can be analyzed in the spherical harmonic (SH) domain, which has special and desirable mathematical properties when it comes to analyzing diffuse sound fields. We present a new measure of diffuseness, the COMEDIE diffuseness estimate, which is based on the analysis of the SH signal covariance matrix. This algorithm is suited for the estimation of diffuseness arising either from the presence of multiple sources distributed around the SMA or from the presence of a diffuse noise background. As well, we introduce the concept of a diffuseness profile, which consists in measuring the diffuseness for several SH orders simultaneously. Experimental results indicate that diffuseness profiles better describe the properties of the sound field than a single diffuseness measurement.